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Parent Shock: Children Are Not Décor

Beckett Jarecke-Cheng, with his father Kipp
Cheng, enjoys a Noguchi coffee table as a play space. Some parents wonder whether having children will mean the end of their high-design dream.

WHEN Jacqueline Brown and her husband, Gavin Friedman, were in their early 30s, they lived in a condominium in Santa Monica, Calif., with a black leather Ikea couch Mr. Friedman had bought for law school, a few modest pieces from Pier 1 Imports and assorted hand-me-down furnishings. Within a few years, though, having acquired professional and financial stability — both were litigation associates at prominent law firms — they bought a house in Cheviot Hills, an affluent neighborhood in West Los Angeles, and began remodeling and decorating.

During two renovations, each costing more than $100,000, they built a two-sided fireplace to separate the living and dining rooms, put in a wine cellar and installed a sleek maple and granite kitchen. They bought molded-wood chairs in the Arne Jacobsen style, Murano glass pendant lamps and a custom walnut entertainment unit. Ms. Brown, who had become obsessed with interior design in law school, poured heart and soul into the projects.

But just as Ms. Brown and Mr. Friedman were establishing their first truly grown-up residence — she was 38, he 37 — Ms. Brown gave birth to their first child, Harrison, a boy who turned out as bouncing as most.

Suddenly they were confronted with a question that had never before occurred to them: given the way baby gear and toys take over households, the uncivilized habits of toddlers and the dangers posed by sharp-edged contemporary furniture, could Ms. Brown and Mr. Friedman continue to live their high-design dream?

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Credit
Brian Ajhar

It is a question they are not alone in facing. As Elizabeth Gregory, director of women’s studies at the University of Houston and the author of the recent “Ready: Why Women Are Embracing the New Later Motherhood” (Basic Books), pointed out, “being a later parent has become part of the mainstream.” (In 2005, Ms. Gregory says in her book, 10 times as many women had their first child between age 35 and 39 as in 1975, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and 13 times as many had their first between 40 and 44.)

At the same time, people age 35 to 44 are the most dedicated group of furniture consumers, outspending adults of all other ages, per household, according to Jerry Epperson, who tracks the American furniture market for Mann, Armistead & Epperson, an investment banking and corporate advisory firm in Richmond, Va. “That’s what these people are willing to invest in,” Mr. Epperson said.

And when the investment has been not in cribs or other nursery furniture but in the classic “double income, no kids” fantasy of a pristine, high-style home for grown-ups, the transition can be hard.

“Going from being a couple to becoming a parent, your whole world changes,” said Robin Gorman Newman, who four years ago started a support group called Motherhood Later ... Than Sooner in New York (it now has chapters across the country), after becoming a first-time mother at 42, 10 years into her marriage. “Once you become a parent, your home is not your own,” she added. “I think you mourn your previous life, at least for a while. You’re never going to have what you had.”

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ADAPTATION Harrison Friedman with his parents, Jacqueline Brown and Gavin Friedman, grips a slippery chair.Credit
Stephanie Diani for The New York Times

Nevertheless, some people try. Ms. Brown and Mr. Friedman — who of course were thrilled to have a child, like all the later-in-life parents interviewed for this article — were also determined not to let Harrison “take control of the house,” Ms. Brown said. They went ahead with putting in flat-front lacquered maple cabinets in the kitchen, even though they soon had to watch a professional babyproofer drill 300 holes in them for safety latches. (Ms. Brown still cringes.) They put up silk Shantung draperies in Harrison’s bedroom, knowing that they might well end up stained, as they soon did — with yogurt. And they held onto the molded-wood chairs, which were not an easy transition from the highchair. “They have a very sleek bottom,” Ms. Brown explained. “He slides off it.”

OTHERS, like Debra Cherney, 49, and Hartley Bernstein, 56, were more resigned to giving up control. They were possibly even happier than most late parents at the birth of their twins, a boy and a girl named Cole and Brooke, in 2003, having lost their daughter Raine to respiratory failure in 2001. When the twins became mobile, the couple realized that they would need to create a designated play space in their prewar Park Avenue apartment. Still, the room they sacrificed — the formal dining room — was tough.

“I’m pretty sensitive aesthetically, and it does something for me when I look at a pretty room,” Ms. Cherney said. “Looking at what the room used to be was the visual equivalent of listening to Bach or Mozart. Now it’s the visual equivalent of listening to Barney.”

She felt the full impact when she and Mr. Bernstein put their 18th-century mahogany dining table and chair set in storage. “When I bought the table I was envisioning these beautiful, lovely dinners with fine china,” she said. “Once you have kids and once you give up those things, it was like, ‘Who was I kidding?’ I remember thinking this room will look nice again — in about 18 years.”

The issue of safety, too, can pose vexing choices for parents in thrall to design. Even before Kipp Cheng and his partner of 15 years, Mark Jarecke, arrived home with their son, Beckett, last March, they could see that many of the furnishings in their Maplewood, N.J., colonial house, including a set of four Barcelona chairs and a glass-top Noguchi coffee table, were accidents waiting to happen. But they weren’t eager to act.

“We are both small-town guys who lived in the city and tried to establish an aesthetic point of view that was largely modernist and minimalist,” said Mr. Cheng, 40, a playwright and a publicist for the American Association of Advertising Agencies. “But when you become parents, you kind of have to throw that out the window.”

As difficult as the prospect of change was for Mr. Cheng, who recalls the details of nearly all the couple’s furniture purchases, it was even harder for Mr. Jarecke, 37, the creative director of CondéNet, the Web division of Condé Nast.

“We spent years collecting meaningful, quality pieces,” he said. “Getting those kinds of pieces — the handmade silk pendant lamp, the teak Danish sideboard — it’s a huge project. Basically each room was finally done, and then it all got blown apart.”

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Brooke and Cole Bernstein with their parents, Hartley Bernstein and Debra Cherney.Credit
Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

Among the most troubling matters was the fate of the Barcelona chairs, whose “corners are basically razor blades,” Mr. Cheng said. After much deliberation, they put three in the garage and wrapped the corners of the fourth in foam so it could stay in the living room. “It was just sad,” Mr. Cheng said.

As for the coffee table, they avoided doing anything until Beckett gave them no choice: while learning to walk last summer, he used it as his main training prop. “He’d cruise and trip and hit his face on the table’s edge,” Mr. Cheng recalled.

Mr. Jarecke initially refused to discuss parting with or altering the table in any way, but they eventually compromised and decided to wrap the edge of the top in foam. “As I’m taping it,” Mr. Cheng said, “I’m saying, ‘I’m taping over what makes the difference between this being a Noguchi table and a Kmart table.’ ” Mr. Jarecke was even more distraught. “It transformed this beautiful modernist piece of furniture into a piece you’d find in a ’70s rec room,” he said.

FOR some design-minded parents, certain compromises are too much.

In 2004, Bob Stratton, a design technologist who specializes in home automation, and his wife, Sandra McLean, 50, a food activist and writer, bought a former tool and die factory in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, and set about turning it into a two-story, 4,000-square-foot loftlike home appropriate for themselves and their son, Vin, and daughter, Fia, then 2 and 5.

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Brooke and Cole Bernstein have free rein in the dining room.Credit
Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

“We spent many, many hours designing a place that would be kid-friendly as well as sensitive to our need to live in a well-designed adult environment,” said Mr. Stratton, 48. Construction took a few years, and the family settled in last March.

They built a kitchen and dining area in the center of the first floor, using durable Corian for both the cabinets and a Parsons-style dining table designed by Mr. Stratton. “I wanted the Corian top so there would be no repeat of the famous carving incident,” Mr. Stratton said, referring to the time when Fia, at 4, used a pen to carve her name into a cherry dining table just delivered from France. (“I thought I would die,” Ms. McLean said.)

They put down cork tiles throughout, as protection for glassware and other breakables, including the children themselves, and they set up a 500-square-foot play area in the basement, with a trade-off that some parents would consider draconian: “They can play with a toy in the main living area, but it has to go away when they’re done,” Ms. McLean said. “I’m very concerned with what’s in my visual space. When people come into the house, I very much do not want them being bombarded with toys.”

She also refused to babyproof furniture when the children were younger. She was “never one of those mothers” who put safety corners on coffee tables, she said. “That stuff is just gross, and I don’t feel you have to sacrifice living space to that degree.” And she decided not to install wire railings on the open side of the floating walnut staircase Mr. Stratton designed to connect the first- and second-floor living spaces.

“We couldn’t bear it,” she said. “It was too ugly. So basically what we did was we trained the kids to hold onto the handrail, and it’s worked. No one’s ever fallen off.”

Still, even extreme devotees of design seem to end up relaxing their standards over time. After several expensive pieces from Ligne Roset were delivered to the McLean-Stratton home last June — a brown microsuede one-arm sofa, a low white leather swivel chair, a white shag carpet and an arched chrome floor lamp — Ms. McLean instructed Fia and Vin not to eat on the couch, and told them half-jokingly not to “sit on it, stand near it or even look at it.”

But in the last several months she has grown to appreciate how the children delight in wrestling on the rug and using the swivel chair as an oversize Sit ’n Spin. “You know what?” she said. “They jump all over it, but it’s good furniture, and it actually holds up fine.”